A subtrope of Made of Iron, perhaps its most common usage. Whether in a Tap on the Head situation, Use Your Head, or any other, getting hit on the head has no lasting effects whatsoever. If you clobber The Hero, the villain, or assorted small fry, they may be very, very dizzy or even out for a while but they will never suffer worse than a headache once they wake up — unless Easy Amnesia is needed. All right, you can also have Circling Birdies if you want. But nothing else.

In short, fictional head injuries are no worse than inconvenient, so have as many as you want.

This is in no way Truth in Television. A blow to the head is probably the worst way to render someone unconscious, especially if you're trying to do it "gently". Injuries from even relatively light blows can be serious, permanent, or even fatal. Whether or not you'll actually knock the person out is something of a crapshoot as well. As a rule of thumb, anyone who's involuntarily unconscious for more than a few seconds has a concussion and needs immediate medical attention to ensure they don't have an epidural haematoma or some other time-bomb of a brain injury. A person who appears fine often subverts the trope by abruptly falling down dead.

Sometimes hand-waving by having the characters treat it as potentially serious and even lethal, but a statistically improbable number of characters turn out to be lucky and suffer no serious damage.

Spider-Man villain Hammerhead has an Adamantium plate embedded in his head. That's not the entirety of his shtick — he's a mobster movie fanboy, who dresses and acts like Al Capone and often uses a tommy gun.

Played with in one of Don Martin's paperback collections. One story tells of Fester Bestertester discovering that Karbunkle has "The Hardest Head In The World". The plot then becomes a parody of the typical movie rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-recovery story ... Karbunkle becomes a star, rich living makes him soft (to where his skull can't even stand up to creamed spinach), his family forgives him, and he works his way back to success again.

Tintin, Tintin, Tintin. Barely a page went by without someone suffering a Tap on the Head, and they'd usually be back on their feet within five minutes, nursing the bump and watching the birdies circle.

Wolverine's skull is nigh invulnerable to anything, it helps that he has his healing factor to back it up. His skull is so hard that he can take a bullet at point blank range and it will just bounce off. Of course, given his long-term memory problems, brain damage is a distinct possibility.

This was definitely subverted in the World War Hulk storyline. A pissed-off Hulk is in no mood whatsoever for Wolverine's bullshit, and curbstomps Wolverine. He does this with both his superhuman strength and speed, hitting Wolverine in the head multiple times so hard and so fast that Wolverine's brain is still slamming against that Adamantium skull, his healing factor can't even begin to keep up, and he's left completely unconscious and out of action for quite some time.

Hawkeye: The Blind Spot plays this trope somewhat realistically (at least at first). Hawkeye is dealt a head injury during a battle with Ronin, and the resulting brain damage is severe enough that he slowly starts going blind. Of course since Status Quo Is God, the hero is cured by the end of the story.

Kate Kane's training to become Batwoman involved her getting regularly beaten, to the point that she became effectively immune to concussions.

Fan Works

In the Gensokyo 20XX Series, it was mentioned that Ran had this as a child and presumably still does, though, it is noted to be kind of a deconstruction in that a rock hard skull may protect from brain injuries but not from pain or, for that matter, concussions, seeing as she had gotten three of them in her childhood.

Yukari: She reminds me of Ran, when she was little. Three busted holes in the roof, one large-sized hole in the floor, three concussions, five nights of crying bloody murder, and five more of a groggy and dazed baby. Yeah, a rock hard skull does not protect from pain. Brain damage maybe but not pain.

In Kill la Kill AU, Ragyo is apparently tolerant to head injuries and, according to her, this comes from her being a party girl in the past.

In Castle in the Sky, after Pazu jumps off a wall, crashes through a brick floor, and lands on the floor, he give the page quote. He gets plenty other blows to the head throughout the movie. In the original Japanese, he says something closer to: "My head is harder than my boss's fist."

Rude has a thick metal billboard and its supporting structure fall on his head while he's busy fighting Loz. The billboard AND the structure bend/split in half where they connect. He's only momentarily stunned.

He also gets whacked upside the head by Reno's Nightstick — which did send him stumbling, but he recovers remarkably fast.

9: Even after 9 smacks him in the face with a monkey wrench (by accident), 2 only needs to be helped back onto his feet and walks around, with seemingly no ill effects from the blow, despite the fact he's one of the older stitchpunks. His head gear might have absorbed a lot of the blow. That and for all we know there isn't anything in his head that would be damaged by it.

Averted in a scene in the Pixar movie Up. Early in the movie Carl in a moment of anger hits a man over the head with a metal object (his steel walker cane). The injured man makes cries of pain as he stumbles back with blood running from a gash on his head.

Toy Story 2 has Rex being used as an impromptu battering ram. Over his objections. An "outtake" shows them doing this, and failing. Justified in that Rex is a toy and can probably take the punishment just fine.

In Tangled Flynn takes a frying pan to the head more than once with out any side effects.

In Treasure Planet, Jim thinks Bones is babbling after a head injury, but he proves to be all too accurate.

Films — Live Action

The Three Stooges used this a lot. Curly in particular dulled and blunted axes, saws, and chisels galore.

In the Drew Barrymore movie The Boys in My Life, a guy manages to defeat a jock simply by making him hit his head and break his hand. Based on a True Story?

In Ernest Rides Again, the eponymous Great Redneck Hope ends up shot in the head by a renegade nailgun while pretending to be Indiana Jones at a construction site. He removes his hat to reveal that all three nails bent on impact — "I'm glad it was the hard end!" — and later, when the villainous Dr. Glencliff tries to remove the Crown Jewels of England from his head by cutting the top half of his cranium off with a surgical saw, Ernest's head turns out to be hard enough to blunt it.

Uncle Buck. John Candy's character survives a bowling ball falling from a tall closet shelf onto his skull.

In Back to the Future, Marty McFly gets KOed when he gets hit by a car belonging to his mom's family, whacking his head on the pavement in the process. There don't appear to be any direct long-term consequences, unless you count the risk of Critical Existence Failure from his mom falling for him. In the second film, Biff KOs him when he visits the clock-tower hotel and casino. Later, he is briefly KOed by a door when his earlier self opens it; this is probably less disabling than not getting hit by the door would have been. And these are probably not all the examples.

In one of the series' famous sets of parallel events, Marty is knocked out cold in each movie, followed each time by a scene of him recovering with Lorraine (in Part III it's Maggie) at his bedside. In Part III the concussion happens when his head hits a fencepost. Needless to say, Marty will need a CT-scan when he gets back to 1985.

In the 1992 boxing film Gladiator, Brian Dennehy claims that a punch to the top of the head will do more damage to the fist than the head in a bare-knuckle brawl. In his fight with the hero, he tilts his head forward before several punches so that the hero injures his hands on his skull.

In Shaolin Soccer, the eldest of the Shaolin monks is "Iron Head", who has a seemingly impervious cranium. His abusive boss repeatedly breaks bottles over his head to chastise his poor performance, with no effect.

Giles has been KO'd by blows to the head many, many times. He never suffers any ill effects. He actually lampshades it in the game by suggesting he had built up a tolerance for cranial trauma.

Lampshaded by Cordelia in the episode Gingerbread:

Cordelia: How many times have you been knocked out, anyway? I swear, one of these times, you're gonna wake up in a coma.

Chuck: Although less extreme than many examples, Casey seems to have a very hard head. He's fond of headbutts, and in one fight scene his opponent punched him in the forehead and clutched at his hand in pain, while Casey ignored it completely.

Dexter: Dexter headbutts Doakes in the face and walks away apparently unaffected by the impact. The only effect on Doakes is to infuriate him into attacking Dexter — in front of everyone else. Then again, Dexter probably didn't ram Doakes very hard, as the point of the attack was to provoke and not to injure Doakes.

Doc West: The title character trains three guys for a fight match, making them focusing on their stronger point: kicks for one, Berserk Button for another, and Hard Head for the third. This last one is trained to get punched in the face for several minutes, without countering or dodging on purpose, to tire the opponent. It works.

Flashpoint: In one episode, Sam is caught in a bomb blast and knocked out for about fifteen minutes. When he comes to he's completely fine. Notably out of place in a series that treats injuries more-or-less realistically.

Forever Knight: When the vampire protagonist-turned-cop is shot in the head he naturally regenerates, and his friends have to scramble to cover things up. LaCroix steals the X-Ray and hypnotises the doctor into saying that the bullet merely glanced off the protagonist's "exceptionally thick" skull.

Happy Days: In the episode where the restaurant burns down due to Chachi being, well, Chachi, Fonzie and the gang are trapped in the bathroom, and the Fonz gets the bright idea to open up a pathway by putting on his motorcycle helmet and bashing a hole in the wall. After crashing through the wall, he pulls his head out, and one of his friends asks what the wall was made out of because it broke so easily. The Fonz calmly replies "Concrete" and falls unconscious. Other than knocking himself out, he suffered no injuries from headbutting through a concrete wall.

Lost: Headbutting, Pistol-Whipping, and other Taps on the Head are (usually) of no consequence. For instance, in the season 5 finale, Jack is hit with a flying toolbox, but gets up moments later. May be justified in that the island has healing powers and won't let people die if their destinies are not yet fulfilled.

Merlin: Prince Arthur. Repeatedly. Like, every time Merlin has to do a spell in front of him, he's conveniently knocked out. Morgana as well.

Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Averted Trope. Kimberly, while practicing after being exhausted by a battle, falls off the balance beam and hits her head. She suffers a concussion and has to be put in the hospital.

Played straight two decades later back in Japan's Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger, where the local Grey Ranger is themed around a Pachycephalosaurus, and consequently displays this trope even when not suited up.

Revolution: Charlie must have a bionic skull. In Episode 9, not only does she survive getting shot in said noggin - a grazing wound only, but she then hits her head on concrete steps hard enough to cause bleeding and a near-death experience, yet she eventually wakes up and shrugs it off, even though in real life (as has been proven in the sad case of actress Natasha Richardson and many other cases) a head wound of that nature has the potential to be fatal.

Scrubs: Dr. Kelso apparently has a "head like a mountain goat", as evidenced by an occasion where the Janitor hit him over the head with his mop and it "only made him mad".

The Wild Wild West: James West and Artemus Gordon should have been prime candidates for brain damage after the season 1, and the subsequent 3.

The Young Ones: Vyvyan who, in one episode, strikes oil by cracking the basement floor with his head, later helps dig it out by headbutting the hole (which leads to Neil accidentally putting a pickaxe through his head), and, from his first appearance, has metal studs on his forehead.

Averted in the Leverage episode "The Blue Line Job". The team has to protect a hockey enforcer who already has serious brain damage from the fights his manager gets him into, and throughout the episode Eliot has a lot of work cut out for him in keeping anything from hitting his head. He doesn't even fight back when the guy attacks him.

"Primeval" : Connor gets an unfortunate amount of concussions, especially in season 3. Half of the time, these knock him unconscious, but as soon as he wakes up he's got nothing more than a headache.

Series/Supernatural: One or both of the Winchesters get knocked out in almost every episode. They do not appear to have serious brain damage. Even when Dean mentioned that he thought he had a concussion in one episode, he didn't seek medical treatment, and he appeared to be fine in the next episode.

Teen Wolf: All of the characters have been bashed in the head one time or another with no repercussions. Justified case as most of them are supernatural creatures with healing powers, particularly all the werewolves. However there's no excuse for Stiles, the Token Human of the pack, who gets knocked out multiple times thanks to being the Non-Action Guy but shakes it off within minutes.

Newspaper Comics

In Flash Gordon, Thun. Dale, seeing him unconscious, asks after him, and Flash can not only assure her it was a minor head injury, but that he will regain consciousness in a few seconds.]]

A Running Gag: someone tries to headbutt a Samoan, but winds up hurting themselves more due to the thickness of their skull. Or during a tag match against teams like The Headshrinkers or Meng and The Barbarian, someone tries the Double Noggin Knocker on them (ramming both opponents' heads against one another), only for it to have no effect, and the two then ram their heads into their opponent's head.

Ox Baker would bash his own head with a chair to both show his opponents that he was not worried about anything they might try to do to them and try to intimidate them by showing what kind of harm he was willing to do himself, so how much he would try to do to them would set in.

WWE's Vladimir Kozlov often uses his head as a battering ram to devastating effect on his opponent and no ill effect on him.

Junkyard Dog's signature move was to get down on all fours and repeatedly ram himself headfirst into a downed opponent.

Japanese indy wrestler Keni'chiro Arai has a head so hard that hitting him over the head with a chair revitalizes him.

The Sheepherders/Bushwhackers had heads so hard, their Battering Ram finishing move involved one grabbing the head of the other and running it into their opponent.

Bad News Brown often simply got angry when his head was slammed into a turnbuckle.

Averted by Al Madril of Pacific Northwest Wrestling: he was known to lose matches when he attempted to head-butt his opponent and then fell back unconscious.

Averted in the case of Chris Benoit. Benoit was known for his Diving Headbutt finisher, but using it so often throughout his career contributed to the massive number of concussions he suffered, resulting in brain damage and one of the factors in his ultimatefate.

Bob Sapp had a legitimately hard head but unlike most examples, getting hit there tended to demoralize him even though it didn't hurt very much because he was a large man used to towering over opponents and thus not used to it.

Christina Von Eerie is both kinds of hardheaded, as she will continue to headbutt opponents even if their heads are hard enough to hurt hers too, such as Santana Garret's.

Deconstructed in Ring of Honor when Takaaki Watanabe passed through while on his learning excursion. The ROH officials learned to pay special attention to his matches after they had several concussion scares with Watanabe, who continued to use headbutts despite them.

Tabletop Games

Averted in GURPS. Blows to the head do quadruple damage, have a good chance of causing unconsciousness and the "critical head blow" table is pretty nasty.

In Blood Bowl, characters can have an ability called Thick Skull. Thick Skull means that your head is so hard that you have a 50% less chance of getting KO'ed.

Blows to the head in Deadlands added two dice to the weapons damage. Since having more dice increased the shooters chances of getting 'exploding' dice, this meant that headshots could do far more damage then initially advertised. A headshot was how an inexperienced saloon gal once got nearly 80 damage with a derringer, a weapon that only does 2d4 damage. For reference, a human only needs 30 damage to kill them (if shot in the torso or head) or have that limb completely destroyed (anywhere else).

Toys

Nearly all characters in BIONICLE- Justified due to their being heavily armoured cyborgs with Artificial Intelligence. Hitting one of them in the head tends to knock them out with no adverse side effects. Hewkii, in particular, has been known to smash rocks with his head- for fun.

Bully: Jimmy Hopkins can take a bat to the head ,yet he can't stay up past 2 AM.

Subverted in the game Godzilla Unleashed. Whenever a monster (Godzilla, Rodan, King Ghidorah, etc.) runs headfirst into another monster (especially a Giant Mecha like Mechagodzilla or M.O.G.U.E.R.A), the first monster ends up stepping back and shaking its head as if in a daze. This is also played straight with Mecha-King Ghidorah, whose "victory pose" consists of him slamming his mechanical center-head into his flesh-and-blood side heads (which must be the three-headed dragon version of a "high five"). Don't ask how this doesn't cause the side-heads to end up with broken jaws or whatnot.

In Fallout2, scoring a critical hit with an aimed attack to the head may cause stunning, unconsciousness for several rounds, or death. If you're the recipient of the second and manage to wake up before your foes kill you off completely, you will have suffered no obvious loss from the trauma, other than hit points. There was also a perk that could be taken called Bonehead, which made you much more resistant to the effects of crits to your head.

Jagged Alliance 2: Attacks to the head may cause reduction in the wisdom attribute. Also, death.

Creatures with permanently injured brains do fall unconscious more frequently (and for less reason) than their healthy peers, though.

A Pokémon with the ability "Rock Head" will not take recoil damage from its own attacks. Quite useful, as attacks that cause recoil damage tend to be very powerful.

Link in the 3-D The Legend of Zelda games will often ram into walls with his head while performing an Unnecessary Combat Roll. He is never harmed in any way by this, despite taking damage from falls and some other impacts.

Eric from The Lost Vikings smashes through the walls with his head on a regular basis.

Played straight in Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City, where Batman, being against killing, gets rid of the thugs by combat, which consist in many kinds of strikes, some ones on the head, and takedowns, which includes bone breaking and hitting heads against the floor, letting the enemies like "unconcsious", but being absolutley still in the floor, just breathing and with a blood pressure half the normal. Also we had to consider Batman had so much medical skills, so, he would must be aware of the fatal effects of the hits on the head.

Bioshock 2: Alpha Daddies are the only enemy in the game that use headbutts. It's more than just their hard-helmets - they're so insane from the loss of their pair-bonded little sisters that they can't take head-trauma brain damage.

Possibly played straight in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. A quest in Vasj'ir has the player relive a naga's memories of fighting kvaldir. The memory starts off with a naga remarking that "The skulls of these kvaldir are hard as rock!" since the player controlled naga had apparently just broken her trident over a kvaldir's head. Since this event is off-camera whether or not the kvaldir survived the blow to the head isn't known, but naga throughout the memories only kill kvaldir with torso-targeted attacks.

Violence Fight has Ron Max, whose character profile says that his head is hard enough to break rocks.

In Ōkami, Amaterasu can hit boulders, vases and jars with her head. A late-game ability learned in Kamui allows her to gradually strengthen her head as she keeps hitting objects.

The T29 Heavy Tank in World of Tanks is infamous for how heavily armored its turret is. It has so much frontal armor on the turret that when it's hull-down it's effectively immune to all but the most powerful guns, and even they won't be able to reliably damage it.

Web Comics

In 8-Bit Theater, Fighter is a master of the ram technique of Zodiac Kenshido, which consists of breaking your opponent's equipment with your head before he breaks your head with his equipment. He also gets stabbed a lot, and once broke through the Armoire of Invincibility with his head (cheap particle board base notwithstanding). In some cases, getting hit/stabbed/shot in the head has made Fighter smarter.

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja plays with this one. In most instances a character who takes a wallop to the head (or a chop to the neck) comes out fine. However, the back of Doc's head was once rudely introduced to a piece of wood (pirates and alcohol were involved) resulting in a concussion and a hallucinatory conversation with a roast turkey. (He got better.) In "Why a Gorilla", the trope is parodied by having Doc "wake up" while being pounded into the ground repeatedly by an angry gorilla; he had been unconscious for the better part of an hour but emerges from the experience completely fine.

El Goonish Shive: Elliot is whacked when found by a guard in the 'Sister' arc. Wrong Genre Savvy, perhaps? When he comes to, he's worried about concussions, brain damage, et cetera. Tedd brushes him off and gets on with some exposition.

Played with when Oggie knocks Lars unconscious - the next scene starts with Lars awakening in a bed with Oggie assigned to watch over him to make sure he was OK. After confirming this, Oggie excitedly informs another character of it: "See? He's avake und talking und no more schtupid den he vos before!"

Lampshaded when Agatha needs something to hammer her newest device into the ground, so it can knock out their enemies. Dimo has a prosthetic metal arm, so Agatha asks him if he can... She doesn't finish her sentence before he uses his head to hammer it into the rock.

Lieutenant Der Trihs in Schlock Mercenary has an artificial skull made of carbonan (a diamond-like carbon material). A doctor comments that in his case, this is like "keeping potato chips in a safe-deposit box".

In Everyday Heroes, Jane first met Mr. Mighty when she was working as a villain. She tried to ambush him with a kick to the head, resulting in a broken ankle for her (and some very unladylike language).

Web Original

Parodied in The Gamers. The characters try to knock their friend unconscious, so his "paralysing fear of water" won't get in the way as they cross a shallow river. They try a few times, in vain, with him losing health points every time, till eventually, one character lands in such a strong hit, that he is "very unconscious". But unfortunately, as the player counts the hit points his character lost, it also turns out he is dead. The blow killed him.

Subverted in Survival of the Fittest in the case of Sean O'Cann. Upon his introduction to the game, Sean is already suffering from a head wound as a result of landing on something hard after being thrown onto the island. After this wound is bandaged, it's seemingly forgotten, up until a couple of days later, when Sean really starts to suffer, his vision blurring frequently and he himself collapsing on more than one occasion. Averted in the v4 Pregame when Christopher Carlson gets the crap beaten out of him by Monty Pondsworth at lunch; he's stated to have spent a good week with a headache and spent the rest of the day having trouble walking.

In The Transformers episode "Call of the Primitives", Autobots and Decepticons are united against a common foe. Druing the battle, the massive Trypticon lands on Grimlock and he is presumed dead. Much later, after the battlefield was abandoned, Grimlock, still alive, manages to blast his way out from under him. Upon freeing himself, he quips, "Good thing me Grimlock have hard head. Otherwise would now be Dino-splatter!"

Brought up in The Simpsons, where an episode reveals that Homer has thick layer of fluid between his skull and brain that give him enormous resistance to cranial damage. Known as 'Homer Simpson Sydrome' Homer: "Oh, why me?!"

Subverted humorously in Beast Wars, where Blackarachnia falls unconscious shortly after knocking out Silverbolt with a headbutt, and feeling rather stupid about trying it in the first place. Even though this is the one series where you might get away with ignoring the KO considering that they're Mechanical Lifeforms.

In Code Lyoko, the kids get smashed in the head all the time, but it doesn't seem to have much effect on their fighting. The frequent Returns to the Past certainly help staving off any long-lasting effects.

While he unsurprisingly has yet to be knocked out by a blow to the head, Hammerhead from The Spectacular Spider-Man has used his to smash through brick walls without ill effects.

In Wakfu, a Hard Head seems to be one definite trait of Iops. Sadlygrove defeated Rubilax in his true form — a huge demon made of stone — by repeatedly head-butting him. Not that the other heroes are slouch either, and regularly receive some serious beating with barely a trace a few frames later.

Lampshaded in Archer: When the title character knocks out a colleague in order to take his place on a mission, he advises, "Try not to stay unconscious too long. It's like, super bad for you." Others later comment on how he could have serious head injuries and he agrees about that and already has a medical appointment to make sure there's no permanent damage.

Zuko has gotten more than a few neck or head impacts, but was never shown to have any serious effects from them.

In a demonstration of earthbending, Toph jumps head-first at a boulder being used for Aang's earthbending training, unaffected by the self-inflicted blow used to split the rock.

Real Life

Truth in Television for certain animals — such as bighorn sheep — but emphatically not so for humans. If something knocks you unconscious, seek medical attention immediately. This would be why humans engaging in hazardous activities often wear helmets. Even with a helmet on, a hard enough blow to the head (or being too close to something exploding) can still cause brain damage.

There are masters of the Iron Head kung fu technique who can break things with their heads. Don't Try This at Home, folks. Not even with stacks of Polo mints. To achieve this, the skull must suffer microfractures. The healing process thickens the skull a bit. Then you repeat the process. Most objects used in breaking demonstrations tend to have a "sweet spot" where fracture can be induced with significantly less force (and hence less trauma). For practitioners who exploit this fact the stunt becomes as much an artful display of precision as it is a show of this trope.

Subverted with the dinosaur Pachycephalosaurus. It was once believed that this dinosaur did use its dome-shaped head to ram into one another's heads (much like modern-day bighorn sheep). However, recent fossil evidence indicates that this was not the case and, instead, Pachycephalosaurus probably fought by using their dome-shaped heads to ram one another in the stomach, thighs, or legs like modern-day giraffes.

The National Football League has had to change its rules, due to recent research into head injuries. The discovery of a previously-unknown type of dementia common among retired NFL players has resulted in an unpopular increase in player fines for unnecessary roughness, and has changed the standards for players to be allowed to return to the field after a head injury. Research suggests that the time it takes to recover from a concussion is actually unknown, but may take weeks or months; and repeated concussions during that period may lead to dementia. Football culture has traditionally valued the ability to play through this type of injury; former Chicago Bears safety Doug Plank, for whom the "46" defense is named, used to speak of playing while so disoriented that he had to be guided to the correct sideline when leaving the field.

The NHL is also beginning to acknowledge this, especially after several players like Derek Boogaard whose primary role was to fight guys like that on other teams and consequently took a lot of blows to the head died relatively young and were found to have serious brain damage post mortem. The suicide-ripple amongst NHL-players was introduced by Tom Cavenaugh a skill-player. After that three more followed suit and scumbags blamed them being enforcers at it.

Very rarely this is played straight in real life, and a human being will have a biological oddity that grants them a minor version of this.

For example, CT scans discovered that boxer Julio Cesar Chavez Sr. had a skull that was considerably thicker than normal, which perhaps explains why Chavez was able to fight for many years (Chavez' pro career lasted from 1980-2005) and in so many slugfests while seldom being affected by his opponent's punches, and also without suffering significant brain damage and post career health issues, as so many boxers do.

Longtime middleweight champion "Marvelous" Marvin Hagler, who was never knocked down or seriously hurt in a boxing match. Similar to Chavez, medical tests showed that he had a biological quirk (the muscles surrounding Hagler's skull are several times thicker than normal, and thus it was believed that they created a cushioning effect against blows) that may have been responsible for this.

Jake LaMotta (whom the movie Raging Bull is based on) had the reputation of being impossible to knock out. He was famous for simply "bull rushing" his opponent and withstanding any punches they hit him with, with little to no effect. Many accounts describe opponent who tired themselves out beating on Jake's head with little to show for it. Most famously, when Jake faced "Sugar" Ray Robinson (whom many boxing experts pick as the greatest fighter ever) for the sixth time, Robinson beat LaMotta so savagely in the later rounds that newspapers afterward dubbed the fight (which happened on Valentine's Day) "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre". The fight was stopped by the referee, but afterward LaMotta taunted Robinson about how in that fight, and all their other bouts, Robinson had never been able to knock LaMotta down.

George Chuvalo is frequently cited by boxing fans as this (since Chuvalo fought powerful, hard hitting heavyweights such as Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Muhammad Ali, and many lesser known but powerful punchers) without ever being knocked down. Chuvalo himself has said that's a mistake by the fans, and that a lot of times punches that looked like they hit him flush were being partially blocked by Chuvalo's arms or that he was moving in subtle ways to rob the blows of their force. Chuvalo has been known to quip "If I really got hit by all the punches people think I was hit by, I'd be brain dead!"

The legendary Roberto Duran fought professionally for over three decades (from 1968-2001) starting as a skinny 120 pound kid and fighting as high as light heavyweight (175 pounds) in a sport where few fighters are able to effectively fight at more than 20 pounds above where they begin. During all that time, and all those fights frequently fighting bigger men, he was knocked out exactly once, by none other than Tommy Hearns, who is a serious contender for being one of the hardest hitting fighters of all time. In a few other bouts the fights were stopped due to injuries or a referee stopping a fight, but that is the only time that Duran was legitimately knocked out.

Shortly before his death, Billy Mays faced airplane turbulence and was struck on the head, after which he insisted he was fine and quoted this trope by name. The coincidence of the timing had led many to believe that he had died of a concussion before the autopsy came out, revealing the cause as heart disease.

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